There’s a new normal in the post-pandemic world, especially when it comes to the workplace.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the suburban footprint of Manhattan office workers has increased by 45,000 employees, with more than one-third of those employees living in “new suburbs” beyond traditional areas like New York’s Suffolk County, according to a recent report from JLL.

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Workers’ shift from the city to suburbs means two things: They’re looking to work in office buildings near major transit hubs, and they’re probably vying to get out of the office earlier than usual.

In other words, location and timing flexibility are “emerging as competitive advantages” in New York City’s office market, with office buildings near transit hubs such as Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station continuing to “outperform in both return-to-office compliance and leasing velocity,” JLL wrote in its report.

Some of those buildings include Vornado Realty Trust’s Penn 1 office tower adjacent to Penn Station, Marx Realty’s 35-story office building at 10 Grand Central next to Grand Central Terminal, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Durst Organization’s 1 World Trade Center skyscraper near the World Trade Center station.

“Commute friction has become an economic variable, not just a lifestyle issue,” Kevin Kelly, a vice chairman at JLL and the report’s author, said in a statement. “Employers must determine who their talent profile is and then consider that where and how you work is now directly tied to productivity and talent recruitment, and is therefore influencing broader real estate demand.”

And, while return-to-office mandates may be bringing employees back to the office, that doesn’t mean they’re staying any later than they need to.

On average, employees are leaving the office 13 minutes earlier in 2025 than they did in 2019, and some are leaving as much as an hour earlier, according to JLL’s report, which studied five large financial services companies to examine today’s workforce patterns.

In addition, given daycare and school pickup times, the peak arrival time for a Manhattan office worker to return to a suburb such as Summit, N.J., moved from 6 p.m. in 2019 to 4 p.m. in 2025, the report found.

“Fully remote models have proven unsustainable for cohesion and training, but rigid mandates ignore structural changes families have already made,” Kelly said. “The firms that will win are those that design work strategies around balancing productivity with the realities of modern family life.”

These changes are not just happening in New York City. JLL analyzed cell phone data in several other cities as well, and found that office workers in San Francisco are leaving work a whopping 26 minutes earlier this year than in 2019, while employees in Chicago are jetting off 22 minutes earlier.

In attempting to anticipate how return-to-office and lifestyle trends will affect in-office employment in the coming years, one thing’s for sure: Landlords with office buildings near major transit hubs will likely come out on top.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.